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King for a day. Or a few weeks at least.

My initial impression of Little King's Story wasn't exactly favorable, but after sitting down and playing the game for an extended amount of time, I quickly got past my initial apathy of what I thought was going to be a watered down RPG experience on the Wii. In fact, I think it's a pretty awesome third party title for the Wii, and one that I think everyone should check out. It bears a bit of similarity to something like Overlord; in the way that you control your villagers, but outside of that I'd say LKS is an entirely unique experience across any currently available platform.

As the game begins, you take on the role of the diminutive King, selected by your adviser to bring your small kingdom back to some form of glory, but you've got a long road ahead of you before you reach that point. You'll start off with only a small section of the map under your control, a few advisors, a cow, and a handful of citizens. The game introduces its mechanics slowly, but the basics are that you'll use your citizens and change them into different jobs, which become available as your funds increase and allow you to build the corresponding training centers.

When you start, you'll only have farmers available, but you'll soon expand into soldiers, woodcutters, hunters and so on. With the farmers, they have specific skills that allow them to dig around in the cracks you'll see in the ground scattered around your current kingdom and the locations surrounding it. These cracks typically reveal treasure or other items, which in turn will go into your overall treasury, or building fund. Once you've collected a few items, if you head back into your throne room and sit on your throne, you'll open up a hub menu of sorts which gives you your current kingdom upgrade options, and you'll start to build up your kingdom from there.

That's really the basics of LKS, amass more buildings and houses to increase your overall population, build structures to train new units, and then take those units out into the field to hunt monsters, take on bosses, or search for treasure. The structure of the game is laid out pretty well, allowing you to slowly get acquainted with each new job class, with certain sections of the field typically blocked off until you've gained access to a new job ability. The map itself is surprisingly large, there's a lot of ground to cover, and as you advance through the days certain treasure locations will change, so there's always something new to dig up. You'll get random requests from villagers along the way, which lead to optional boss encounters. Defeating these bosses will free up more space for your kingdom to expand, and you'll be able to increase your overall citizen count through that.

The story isn't particularly engaging, but it does have a certain charm to it due mostly to the overall look of the game. The characters are stylized, cutesy humans, with the king himself being little more than a boy, while the rest of your people are quirky and cartoon like in nature. The game uses a fake language for the spoken stuff, something akin to the fake-speak in Animal Crossing, but it just adds to the overall charm of the presentation. I'm not entirely sold on the use of old classical themes for certain bits of the music in the game, I found it to be a little distracting for the most part, and I would have preferred more original tunes instead, especially because I found the original music that the game does use is pretty well done.

Visually the game isn't particularly impressive with the models or texture work, but the game does such a great job with its art design that you'll hardly notice it. There's a ton of bright color to just about everything, and the overall layout and top down camera view masks most of the shortcomings. It's a great example of what art design can accomplish over hardware deficiencies, and it's something I wish more Wii developers would keep in mind when designing games that cater to a more "hardcore" audience.

And LKS is definitely a "hardcore" title, despite its cute appearance. There's a lot of content packed into the game, and the overall controls are pretty standard without any motion support. I'm almost surprised that it doesn't have classic controller support included, but that's not really a fault of the game. The boss fights all employ some use of strategy and patterns to learn, and if you're not careful you'll burn through a lot of your citizens in combat by just tapping A to send them into the battle. Even the basic enemies can take you for a ride if you're not using the right units to fight against them, and going out on a simple treasure run can turn into a quick disaster without some type of fighter unit backing you up. That said, the game handles death by not really punishing you past a day or so, usually when you retire for the day you'll have most of your units back to life and at full health the following morning.

There's other little elements to the game that add to the reason why I like it, like just seeing your workers and soldiers partaking in little tasks around the kingdom when you're just walking and checking things out. You'll see the farmers toiling away on crops, or soldiers setting up checkpoints in little towers, or guarding an entrance or bridge. Carefree citizens, the building blocks of your units, will often scamper about and play around the village, living up to their title before you assign them to a specific job duty. The entire kingdom you slowly build up has a lot of independent life to it, which is pretty cool to see and adds a certain level of immersion to the stuff you create.

Overall, Little King's Story is a great title for the Wii, and a blast to play. The gameplay mechanics are simple enough that most will be able to pick it up and figure it out, but there's enough difficulty involved, and ground to cover, that it'll keep even the more hardcore player interested for quite a while. Definitely worth picking up, and one of the better third-party titles available on the system. I highly recommend you check it out, I don't think you'll be disappointed.